February 17, 2026 - Dutch / Photographer / Social - Street /

Rineke Dijkstra

Rineke Dijkstra was born in 1959 in Sittard, a small town in the southern Netherlands, and studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. For the first decade of her career, she worked as a commercial and editorial photographer, producing competent but unremarkable work for magazines and corporate clients. The transformation that would make her […]

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February 17, 2026 - American / New Topographical / Photographer /

Robert Adams

Robert Adams was born in Orange, New Jersey, in 1937, and moved with his family to Colorado when he was a boy. The landscapes of the American West — the immense skies, the mountains, the plains that seemed to promise limitless space and possibility — shaped his sensibility from childhood. He studied English literature at […]

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February 17, 2026 - Family of Man / Hungarian / Magnum / Photographer / Social - Street /

Robert Capa

Robert Capa was born Endre Friedmann in Budapest in 1913, the son of a Jewish tailor. As a teenager he became involved in left-wing politics, and at seventeen, threatened with arrest by the authoritarian Hungarian government, he fled to Berlin. He enrolled at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik and found work in a darkroom, beginning […]

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February 15, 2026 - Family of Man / Photographer / Social - Street / Swiss /

Robert Frank

Robert Frank arrived in the United States in 1947 with a Swiss passport, a working knowledge of several European photographic traditions, and an eye that would transform the medium forever. Born in Zürich in 1924 to a Jewish family of German descent, he had apprenticed with photographers in Switzerland and learned the discipline of careful, […]

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February 17, 2026 - American / Photographer / Social - Street /

Robert Mapplethorpe

Robert Mapplethorpe was born in 1946 in Floral Park, a middle-class neighbourhood in Queens, New York, the third of six children in a Catholic family. He studied drawing, painting, and sculpture at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he absorbed the influence of Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, and the Pop artists, and where he first […]

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February 17, 2026 - American / Photographer / Social - Street /

Roni Horn

Roni Horn was born in New York City in 1955 and grew up with an early sensitivity to the instability of perception, the way that things that appear identical can reveal themselves as fundamentally different depending on how and when they are encountered. She studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and received her […]

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February 17, 2026 - American / Family of Man / Photographer / Social - Street /

Russell Lee

Russell Werner Lee was born in Ottawa, Illinois, in 1903, into a comfortable middle-class family. He studied chemical engineering at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, graduating in 1925 and working briefly in the roofing industry. It was an unlikely beginning for a man who would become one of America’s most prolific and compassionate documentary photographers. Lee […]

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February 17, 2026 - American / Photographer / Social - Street /

Ryan McGinley

Ryan McGinley was born in 1977 in Ramsey, New Jersey, the youngest of eight children in an Irish-Catholic family. He grew up skateboarding and immersed in the punk and hardcore music scenes, influences that would profoundly shape his visual sensibility. He studied graphic design at Parsons School of Design in New York, where he began […]

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February 17, 2026 - American / Photographer / Social - Street /

Sally Eauclaire

Sally Eauclaire emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s as one of the most perceptive and influential voices in the critical discourse surrounding colour photography at a moment when the medium was undergoing a profound transformation. For decades, serious art photography had been almost exclusively associated with black-and-white imagery. Colour was dismissed by the […]

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February 17, 2026 - American / Photographer / Social - Street /

Sally Mann

Sally Mann was born in Lexington, Virginia, in 1951, the daughter of Robert Munger, a general practitioner with a deep love of literature and the natural world, and Elizabeth Evans Munger, a woman of fierce intelligence and quiet reserve. She grew up on the family’s farm in the Shenandoah Valley, a landscape of rolling hills, […]

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RESOURCES

This is where I keep the research — over 190 studies of the photographers, writers, curators and exhibitions I’ve found most compelling. Each entry offers a summary of their practice together with a few examples of their work, where copyright permits
You’ll find landmark exhibitions like New Topographics and The Family of Man alongside individual studies of Magnum photographers and many others who have shaped the way we see. From Atget to Eggleston, Arbus to Shore — the entries span the full history of the medium.
                                                      
You can also browse by genre — Street, Fashion, Landscape, Documentary and others. Most of these categories took shape during my MFA studies at the Belfast School of Art, and plenty of the people here appear in multiple categories.

NATIONALITIES